Page 30 - Fundamentals of Magnetic Thermonuclear Reactor Design

Facilities With Magnetic Plasma Confinement Chapter | 2 13

FIGURE 2.7 The spheromak functional scheme.

(‘frozen in’) magnetic field are injected into a mirror trap (Fig. 2.7). The bunches
slow down each other, and their magnetic fields merge, while their kinetic en-
ergy is transformed into heat energy.
As the magnetic flux attenuates, more plasma bunches are required.
Such systems may achieve a quasi-stationary working mode, in principle.
The stellarators and open-end magnetic mirrors are the most viable tokamak
alternatives.

2.3 STRUCTURE AND TYPICAL PARAMETERS OF TOKAMAK
REACTORS

The fusion community has already identified the mainstream controlled fusion
projects for the near term as the ITER (fusion physics research and comprehen-
sive analysis of the reactor operability) and IFMIF (properties of fusion materi-
als exposed to intensive neutron fluxes). These R&D should help to define better
the operational missions and requirements of a commercial reactor and a fusion
power plant (FPP) in general.
Specification of every parameter and characteristic of such a reactor is pres-
ently not an easy task, as the search for optimum ways to ‘incorporate’ fusion
energy into nuclear power engineering is still in progress. At the forefront here
is the problem of choice between the purely fusion and fission–fusion hybrid
concepts and the identification of the fusion energy’s most important mission
(electricity generation, production of fissile nuclear materials, nuclear waste
transmutation, generation of fuel for hydrogen power engineering, etc.).